BROADWAY The Shape-Up

For years, while New York's city hall was just praying for rain, Broadway learned how to cope with its own drought problem -dried-up reservoir of domestic drama. The producers simply discovered how to recirculate what they had (from novel to play to movie to musical to revival) and, even more important, how to tap the Thames. As a result, the Broadway theater may be, intellectually, the Great American Desert but it never fails to mount at least 50 new productions a year. Hopefuls of the coming season:

COMEDIES

"You have to be in love with the theater," says Henry Fonda, "to come back to New York on the ninth of August." Which is what Fonda did to rehearse for his first stage role in three years. It is William Goodhart's Generation, concerning the troubles of an account executive with his daughter (Holly Turner). Also succumbing again to the Seventh Avenue itch this year is Tom Ewell, as a gambler in Xmas in Las Vegas, by Jack (The Prodigal) Richardson.

Three others of this year's top bananas were chosen less for their Broadway experience than for their nightclub or Nielsen ratings. Cabaret Comic Jack Carter will appear as an expatriate screenwriter in London in Come Live with Me; TV Host Durward Kirby will be a fumbling philanderer in Me and Thee; and Alan King is applying his gift for Levittown levity to the role of a shrinking headshrinker in The Impossible Years. It is the first Broadway play by Groucho Marx's son Arthur.

Probably the most sexually complicated of the impending comedies is the import Entertaining Mr. Sloan. A boarder in English suburbia, Sloan is entertained for the first half of the year in the nymphomaniacal landlady's room, the second half in her homosexual brother's -a situation that kept West End audiences laughing for six months and won the London Critics' Award as the best new play of 1964.

MUSICALS

If nothing else, musicals will be more expensive than ever. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever you can see from the orchestra for $11.90. Of course, Broadway is lucky to see it at all. Alan Jay Lerner originally launched it in 1961, shortly after he had found a new collaborator named Richard Rodgers. But the two could not seem to make beautiful music together, and Burton (Finian's Rainbow) Lane superseded Rodgers. Clear Day's heroine, Barbara Harris, is a girl with extrasensory perception but blurred self-perception -which gives stage room for Louis Jourdan as her psychoanalyst. Another Harris (Julie) is being taught to dance by. Choreographer Michael Kidd for her musical debut in Skyscraper, which was lifted loosely from Elmer Rice's twice-told drama Dream Girl.

The Theatre Guild is similarly gambling on a nonsinging actress, Geraldine Page, for yet another musical adaptation, The Great Adventure, which in its original incarnation was Arnold Bennett's 1913 novel, Buried Alive, and in reincarnation was the 1943 Monty Woolley movie, Holy Matrimony.

Other grist for the musical millwrights includes Marjorie Rawlings' novel The Yearling; Don Quixote, to be known as Man of La Mancha; and Dickens' Pickwick Papers, which (as Pickwick) David Merrick imported from London last spring and cannily deployed on a pre-Broadway crosscountry tour that has already nearly recouped production costs. Auntie Mame is being put to music as My Best Girl by Jerry (Hello, Dolly!) Herman; and Anya (nee Anastasia) is given voice with a score gleaned from themes by Rachmaninoff. Then there is a pair of transubstantiated movies: Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria will become Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity with Gwen Verdon. The Blue Angel, as Sugar City, relocates to New Orleans, with Walter Slezak and Lilo. The composer: Duke Ellington.

Director Joshua Logan explains: "It's so hard to get a good original story for a musical, and I'd rather do a good story three times than a bad one once." He is staging a musical rendition of William Inge's Picnic (which he previously directed for Broadway and Hollywood). It is called Hot September and stars Kathryn Hays and Sean Garrison.

DRAMA

The conversation piece of 1965-66 will almost certainly be last season's London sensation -The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. The author is a German named Peter Weiss, just one of the foreign playwrights likely to lend savor and distinction to the season. They include John Osborne, whose Inadmissible Evidence was compared flatteringly by British reviewers to his Look Back in Anger. Then there is Christopher Plummer in Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a morality play and stage spectacular based on the conquistadores' betrayal of the Incas.

Producer Alexander Cohen and Greek Director Michael (Zorba the Greek) Cacoyannis are bringing in The Devils, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. With Jason Robards as the 17th century priest and Anne Bancroft as the prioress whose lurid accusations lead him to the stake, theater parties are buying early.

Edward Albee will be making his fourth annual on-Broadway appearance with Malcolm, a dramatization of Novelist James Purdy's black comedy tracking a 15-year-old's picaresque trail to destruction. Tennessee Williams will be represented by Slapstick Tragedy, which he calls "a pair of fantastic allegories on the tragicomic subject of human existence on this risky planet."

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